


Family Tree

by samchandler1986



Category: GLOW (TV 2017)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-28
Updated: 2018-05-31
Packaged: 2019-05-15 01:58:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14781449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samchandler1986/pseuds/samchandler1986
Summary: They’ve talked about his movies a lot, prompted by the yellowing posters she finished hanging for him. But the rest is still no more than a sad timeline, tracing his route from the angry not-so-young man he was in Sacramento, 1967, to now.





	1. Chapter 1

“You really came out here to get to know me?”

She turns, away from the waiting limo, her ride back to the motel. Faces him one more time. “Yeah.”

He shakes his head, like she’s declared she’s going to run for president or walk on the moon rather than just have an honest conversation with him. “D’you… do you still want to? Or have you already seen enough?” She’s not at all sure, from his expression, if the latter option is what he fears or prefers.

Her throat tightens. _Of course I want to_ , she almost says. The part of her that used to trace the bridge of her nose in the mirror, question every element of herself she couldn’t find reflection of in her mother. But she can’t quite get the words out past the part that still hurts; the bit that hoped he’d see her and just _know_.

 _Hey Justine, all those things that don’t make sense, all that anger you don’t quite know where to put - I’ve got your answers_ right _here._

It stupid, she knows, but she’s still grieving for the father of her dreams he’s spent the last ten weeks pissing all over.

“ _I’d_ like to,” he offers, “for whatever that’s worth.”

“What?”

“Get to know you. As, uh, as my kid.”

She doesn’t know what to make of that, not having considered before that her nineteen years on the planet might be worth his interest. She finds she can’t quite look him in the eye.

“Yeah,” she says, but over her shoulder, to the waiting limo. “I still want to.”

* * *

The front door slams open, and booted feet stomp down the hallway. Her bedroom door snaps shut, hard enough to make the apartment lights rattle. Again.

“Hey!” he hears himself shouting. “You mad about something?”

Justine’s reply is to turn her music on, so loud dust drifts from the ceiling, dislodged by the angry bass of _London’s Calling._

“Godammit,” he mutters, stubbing out his cigarette irritably. He knew this wasn’t going to be easy. Not least because - in spite of his total absence for the first nineteen years of her life - Justine seems to have inherited his prickly temperament. Between the two of them the apartment has all the calm and tranquillity of an Excomm meeting.

He knocks on her door, predictably to no avail. “Hey!” he shouts again, so far out of his depth the fish have lights on their noses. Nothing he says next is going to be good, that much he’s sure of. “Hey, that’s still technically _my_ room you’re hiding out in—”

She wrenches open the door. “I’m _not_ hiding.”

He opens his mouth to snap back, closes it again. Her face is red; puffy from crying, mascara smudged into panda-eyes he doesn’t _think_ are deliberate. “What happened?”

She flinches. “Jesus. It doesn’t matter. Nothing. Just leave me alone, okay?”

“Fine! If you don’t want to talk, I don’t care. Just-just don’t slam the doors next time—”

“Yeah, okay, whatever,” he replies, waving her hand in irritation, as if he is a fly she can swat away. “Can you leave me _alone_ now?”

“I’m going! I’m _going_! Christ—”

She shuts the door in his face.

There’s a part of him – a larger part than he’d like – that’s tempted to put his fist through it in response. He settles for pacing around the front room instead, trying to calm down. His rage sound-tracked by the best of British punk rock.

_The ice age is coming! The sun’s zooming in! Meltdown expected!_

“Fuck it,” he says, and picks up his keys.

* * *

She sneaks out of her room when she hears his engine start. Suspects he’s gone to find the nearest bar – enough bourbon, blow or both to forget whatever it is _he’s_ currently wound up about. She’s not got the energy to care, frankly.

Padding into the kitchen she finds the cupboards are bare. He’s always haphazard with shopping, and the choice is stale Wonderbread or pickles from a jar that might be older than she is. Sighing, she thinks not for the first time of the home she’s left behind. The order and comfort of her life before… all this.

She moves like a ghost through the place, running her hand absently over the shelf in the living room. Dust, science-fiction, cigarettes. Like everything else, the crucible of his creative efforts doesn’t match the picture she once painted in her head. They’ve talked about his movies a lot, prompted by the yellowing posters she finished hanging for him. But the rest is still no more than a sad timeline, tracing his route from the angry not-so-young man he was in Sacramento, 1967, to now. Names, places, dates. Stripped of the gory details, she suspects to spare him some shame, although God knows what could be worse than some of what she's already seen. Probably she’d have gotten more from his obituary.

The sound of his keys in the lock interrupts that miserable line of thought. He freezes at the sight of her; expression somewhere between anger and relief. His flair for the dramatic, at least, she’s always imagined right. “Still mad?”

She shakes her head. “I’m sorry for slamming the doors.”

“Yeah,” he says, before he can stop himself. “It’s pretty childish.”

“Well—”

“I get it,” he says, cutting her off, moving past with his bag of Chinese take-out into the kitchen. “It’s probably my fault.”

“No…” she manages, nonplussed, “it was just a stupid fight with Billy—”

“I meant the temper.” He indicates the plastic trays. “I got you chow mein, by the way.”

“What about my temper?”

He shrugs, opening his food and inhaling gratefully. “Family trait, I guess.”

She makes a show of dishing out noodles. “Really?”

From his sharp look, he sees straight through her guile. “Yeah.”  He pinches his sinuses. “I guess it’s time for that conversation, is it?”

“About anger management?”  

“Yeah, and biting wit and a tendency to rush into things without thinking them through. Ringing many bells?”

“Some.”

“Go sit down,” he grimaces. “I need at least some coffee before we do this.”


	2. Chapter 2

It’s a shoebox in his hands, that’s all, but he carries it like a heavy weight. She takes it from him and gingerly opens the lid.

Her fingers hover over the assorted ephemera inside, heart beating against her ribs. In some ways its what she expects, a mess of things that make no sense. A black-and-white photograph labelled in fading ink. A bedraggled ostrich feather, ticket stubs. A medal with a blue and white striped ribbon, and yellowing papers she doesn’t dare yet unfold.

They don’t fit, she realises. The Sam she knows is pulpy paperbacks and VHS tapes; typewriter ribbons and empty cigarette cartons. The box feels almost like a prop. But there’s something strange about him too right now - oddly nervous - running his hands absently over his knees.

She picks out the photograph carefully. A young woman. She wears her dark hair in curls and a floral-patterned dress. Beautiful but sad. There’s enough that’s familiar around her eyes and mouth to know who she is, without him needing to speak.

She turns the photo over, reading the faded letters on the back. _Sylvia Brown_ , someone has written, _1932._

Her stomach drops. It’s ridiculous, some dwindling part of her insists, that so small a revelation should be so shocking. Of course, Sam didn’t spring from nothing. And who _doesn’t_ change their name when they go to Hollywood?

“Sylvia,” she hears herself rasp.

“Yeah. She uh… Well, she was your grandmother,” he says pointlessly.

“No, I mean… It’s not your real name.”

He frowns at that, just a little. “It’s my real name,” he says levelly, “it’s just not the one I was born with. Anyway, Sam Brown sounded like a shoe polish.”

It’s hard to reconcile the girl in the picture with the idea of being _anyone’s_ mother, let alone Sam’s. “What was she like?”

He is quiet for a long moment, mouth a thin line. “Young,” he says eventually. Her stomach lollops queasily. “Lonely.”

“Your Dad wasn’t…?”

“No.” His mouth twists, a cynical smile. “Like I said. Family traits.”

She bites her lip. “Who was he?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I have my suspicions. But at this point, does it really fucking matter?”

All these years she’s wanted a point of connection. Tried to find it in his work, in the words of his interviews, the way he frames a scene. Not like this, she thinks, as the bile rises up. Not this core of empty, un-belonging as their touchstone. She never wanted to _pity_ him.

She bolts from her seat; only just making it to the bathroom before she vomits.

“Fuck,” he says, following after. He hovers awkwardly in the door as she retches. “Look, kid, I’m sorry—”

“It’s okay.” She wipes her mouth, surprised to find she’s telling the truth. “I wanted to… I wanted to know this stuff.”

“Really? This stuff? _This_ is what you wanted to know?”

“Okay, I didn’t know it was this… fucked up. But I wanted the truth.”

He shakes his head. “One piece of fatherly advice? The truth is never what you want it to be. Sometimes the lie is better.”

“You really believe that?”

His mouth twitches, grudging respect in his eyes. “Not yet. But I’m working on it.”

“Let me know how it goes.”  

* * *

Dust rises in the air, caught in a shaft of morning light. The whole house smells sweetish, mixed mildew and age. She moves through the shell of his past open mouthed, like a kid in a museum. It makes him shudder.

“This was your room?”

“Yeah,” he says. “But look, I didn’t buy it to memorialise—”

“Then why _did_ you buy it?”

 _To let it rot. To prove a point._ “Not for any good reason.”

“But it’s where you grew up…” She smiles, not understanding. And he’s glad, really. It means that whatever else he’s fucked up for her, he didn’t get in the way of a happy childhood.

“No. It’s just where I used to live.”

It’s too far gone, he realises, for her to really understand. The past is another country. And fourteen people crammed into this tiny home – the very idea of soup kitchens and empty stomachs – they’re as alien to her as another planet.

He wants to say: here’s how it is. Mom was just a kid with a kid, trying to keep a stupid dream of a career on screen alive. Everyone knows where that road goes, and so it did, until one time she got so sick I thought she was going to die. Mrs Cohen found me praying to the nice lady with the torch that brings the movies on screen, right about where you’re standing now. After that she found religion — another stupid dream of a happy ending, by the way— and took in sewing and eventually my step dad.

And that’s when life _really_ went to shit.

“Look, I bought it to piss off my step dad,” he says instead. “He always told me chasing Hollywood would come to nothing, and after I made my first bit of real money on a picture I wanted to prove him wrong.”

She grins. “What did he say when he found out?”

He swallows. “Nothing worth repeating.”

There’s still a scar on his knuckle from when that particular moment of triumph turned to blows. Only by then he wasn’t a scared kid anymore, but another angry, bitter man—

“Are you even listening?”

“What?”

“I said you could do the place up. There’s more room here than at your apartment.”

“No.”

“But it’s just falling to pieces.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s what you _want_?”

“Yeah.” 

“I don’t understand.”

“I know. Come on. This place gives me the creeps and I need to finish that script by…” He checks his watch theatrically. “…yesterday.”

“Why’d you bring me here if you hate it?” she asks, as they descend back to the street.

“Because it doesn’t matter where you’ve come from. It’s about where you’re going.” She manages not to roll her eyes at this pronouncement, but it’s a close-run thing. “Ah, c’mon. Don’t look at me like that.”

“It’s just… not the kind of thing you usually say.”

“Well,” he says, “I’d hate to be fucking predictable.”

She smiles at that, says nothing, and they walk on together in the sun.


End file.
